Is hosting needing some donations? Seemed like a year ago it was last mentioned.

Brave seem to be in a decent position as an alternative though you can still find a bunch of SERPs where their stuff is identical to Google's or very close. Likely that historical cliqz data which is maybe guised as their web discovery project. Remember Bing getting slapped down for that kind of cloning 2010ish although their scraping was more blatant.

Still no known crawler and going about using Googlebot robots.txt rules using browser UAs. And selling content under AI services...

I still like them more than DDG just being a Bing wrapper though. DDG seem to have more market share for now but at least Brave are showing some innovation.

Agree that voting is going to be riddled with bots. Surely having some kind of social network to weight the votes, as people/groups would marginalise the bot stuff- though there'd likely be another evolution of gaming to that.

/tangent
I've been using Brave browser for watching youtube, works a charm for avoiding ads. I used to avoid ad blockers knowing that it's a lifeline for independent sites but some are unusable without one, and G make plenty money so...

Really noticeable and noticed by lots of non-tech people.

wiki has been going well for a long time. I know it's a relatively unpopular opinion but I think they were part of the initial problem of centralisation. Any non-commercial content basically ended up on there under the guise of referenced content and G loved to rank it above most things. That and it's generally convenient to visit a site where you have a gist of their layout to save yourself time as a searcher.

There must have been a lot of original sources that were maybe the bulk of an article that are now ranked #2 or lower where wiki is #1, halving their CTR.

And then AI/anyone can just grab the wiki dump and proceed to recycle content.

I've got a few quid in a company called AFC energy. They have hydrogen systems designed for off-grid, but their other angle is ammonia cracking to create hydrogen which they claim is more efficient than straight up electrolysis. Remains to be seen whether I trade out in profit.

I think the gist is that hydrogen is tricky to transport and store, so ammonia is effectively a battery and works well for anything off grid.

Seems to make sense that electricity curtailment could be redirected towards storing energy chemically, especially in places that lack preferential hydro geography. Lots of sums and energy (in)efficiencies involved and big unknowns like government subsidies.

Would hate to be Google nowadays. They now have to reverse engineer "what's the colour of shite" and differentiate the six other colours.

Christmas for SEOs

One that caught my eye was hashing of text surrounding an anchor. Probably decent for checking naturalness and uniqueness as well as context.

Not often you get the BBC talking about the G algo...

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-how-googles-new-algorithm-will-shape-your-internet

Missed it on Friday, non-event on Saturday, from SE Scotland. Cracking pictures from locals. Guess I'll need to go to Lapland or wait another 20 years.

Glad that a lot of people managed to see it for the first time though

In the UK we're at the point where renewable energy generation exceeds fossil fuels. The pricing is still a bit mad though.

In Scotland we have 30% of the renewable generation vs about 8% of the population/demand and still pay the highest rates in the UK on the National Grid. Though recent projects actually pay out to local communities in the case they don't like the look of wind farms. £5K per MW of rated power per year. It's a decent incentive.

Locational pricing seems to be the way forward. There's been an effective ban on onshore wind in England for the past 10 years or so.

Luckily there's efforts like Ripple Energy where people in England can offset their carbon emissions to an extent.

Interesting one wrt Yandex's algo leak, they promoted hosts when certain words were in the query iirc, (wiki, reddit) bit of an algo crutch

The overwhelming M.O. would seem to be people looking for other people's opinions, maybe in part trying to ignore the AI/FAQ stuff/guff that normally appears in SERPs.

>Has search quality just become too hard or does Google simply not care?

I don't follow that close, it probably is harder than before and Google with its share/size is going to have to dredge their results harder. I'd guess it's more the latter, they don't have any real competition to push them to make harder choices. Their revenue per search is so much higher than Bing. Maybe other indexes having access to G's advertisers would help level it all up.

Looks like the revolution of ChatGPT/AI has put Bing into double figures though. https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Lengthy HN discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

Airbnb bookings:

>difficult

Not sure and perhaps not viable for all forms of crop, or maybe different setups depending on height requirements. I've read that yields can be increased because the shading is beneficial and can help keep the panels cool with the transpiration from below.

With cattle they help prevent vegetation obscuring the panels while the panels provide shade.

I guess there's unavoidably a trade off somewhere.

It sounds like a quickly evolving field (no pun intended) even though the wiki page mentioned the idea of panels/agriculture in 1981. 

I know at least here in the UK that farmers/landowners can be paid for planting forests (for the same carbon goals), and energy generation can be another form of income for them.

The land use argument is definitely one angle I keep seeing from climate change sceptics as littleman interpreted from the article.

Agrivoltaics also, another dual use of land that doesn't make the space requirement sound as daunting.